We've got billions of dollars worth of songs on our iPods.

American law sets the maximum penalty for pirating a single song at $150,000. Zillow, meanwhile, tells me that five bedrooms and a pool can be had for $142,000 just west of Scottsdale. When Phoenix McMansions can run you less than a filched copy of "My Sharona," some see signs of a looming apocalypse. But I see salvation.

My $249 iPod Classic has room for over 53,000 three-minute songs in immaculate fidelity. Under our anti-piracy laws, that's about $8 billion worth of music. Four years of economic turmoil had left me feeling as impoverished as anyone. But with my $8 billion iPod, I suddenly feel like a plutocrat.

It wasn't always like this. Last Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of the bankruptcy of Napster—the notorious startup that was sued into oblivion with a multi-billion dollar piracy lawsuit. When Napster first launched, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. That was a measly $1.5 million worth of pirated goods—barely enough for a Greenwich teardown.

As music player capacity has grown, so have the lawsuits. Some were shocked when LimeWire was sued for $7.5 trillion two years ago. That was over ten times the gross revenue that our music industry had racked up since Thomas Edison first filled a 20-ton wax cylinder with an early rendition of “Free Bird” (something that today's scientists can manage with a mere eighty pounds of wax—such is the march of technology).

But my $8 billion iPad has helped me see how silly it is to use market data to evaluate the cost of piracy. Actual value is determined in a bare-knuckled battle of ideas, waged by professional lobbyists and persons-of-congress. That value is then reified in legal brawls with the likes of LimeWire—a virulent menace which wrought damages equal to half of our national debt in a few swift years.

And the problem doesn’t stop at our borders. In 2006, our music industry sued a Russian site called allofmp3.com for $1.65 trillion. While that was penny-ante stuff compared to LimeWire, it represented a shocking 80 percent of Russian GDP. I'd thought Russia had mellowed into a cranky but peaceful peddler of vodka and hockey pucks. But beneath the facade was a rogue website masquerading as a half-continent.

Piracy apologists will dismiss the measures of value reflected in trillion-dollar lawsuits, $8 billion iPods, and our $150,000 piracy law (1999's Copyright Damages Improvement Act). They'll make flimsy claims about the law being "bought" by “media interests” from “senators” who are so rapacious that's they've quite literally lost their sense of the absurd, resulting in laws that are so disproportionate, grasping, and harebrained that they can barely even be parodied.

But I have no time for that sort of cynicism. Laws and the penalties levied for breaking them are unalloyed reflections of a society's priorities. Viewed through this lens, the piracy of a single copy of a single song is roughly 300 times worse than driving drunk in New York state (which carries a $500 maximum fine). That's because while drunk driving can cost lives, music piracy is known to lead to meth addiction, human cannibalism, and societal collapse.

Trillionaire kingpins though they are, today's music pirates are pipsqueaks compared to their eventual successors. Just as our laptop computers surpass their mainframe ancestors in all technical respects, the scale of tomorrow's piracy will one day dwarf even LimeWire's deeds. And as the damages and liabilities mount, language itself could become inadequate to describe the problem's scope. So I propose that we adopt the vocabulary of data storage when discussing digital piracy, as it is uniquely rich when it comes to big numbers.

For instance, as any preschooler can tell you, a billion bytes make a gigabyte, and a trillion make a terabyte. We can likewise say that my iPod holds up to eight GigaDollars worth of music ($8GD), and that LimeWire was sued for 7 TerraDollars ($7TD).

This nomenclature will give us valuable headroom as technology races forward. For instance, should the feds catch every California high schooler filling an iPod Classic with pirated music, they can announce a 16 PetaDollar ($16PD) bust (the petabyte being the next step up the ladder from the terabyte). Should music player capacity meanwhile grow by another factor of a thousand (as it's already done once since Copyright Damages Improvement Act was passed), that would result in a 16 ExaDollar ($16XD) bust.

Should Copyright Damages be Improved further by future laws (and why not—it has been 13 years now, and the prevailing $150,000 penalty hasn't even been adjusted for inflation), we could soon enter the realm of ZetaDollars ($ZD). The biggest denomination of data is the Yottabyte. Its counterpart, the YottaDollar ($YD), is $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00, which exceeds the world's annual economic output by a factor of several billion. That may sound like a lot—but if present trends continue, content piracy will cost us over a YottaDollar per day by the end of the decade.

Copyright math is heady stuff. But that's why it's best left to experts—like lobbyists and persons-of-Congress.

Rob Reid (@rob_reid) is a novelist, entrepreneur, and music industry expert. He's also a xenobiologist with a specialty in interstellar copyright. His forthcoming science fiction novel, Year Zero, is due out July 11, but he's so desperate for readers that Random House is giving 30 copies away for free at his site this week. Visit Rob's site for more information about his book, a chance to win, and your RDA of snark.

They just forget one thing: everywhere (except, it seems, the music industry), market determines the value of what you sell.

One can't mortgage a house using an iPod because music is just not that worthy.

I graduated in Music and worked as a musician for some years. I could live comfortably (but would never be able to afford a BMW anyway) with Music. Music sharing was good for me - people would know I exist and come to my concerts.

The Music Industry is useless as a middleman nowadays. Big names don't need it, and the rest of the musical world also doesn't need it.

If no one is willing to pay for what you sell, it's time to re-determine the value. Cinema tickets cover the costs of producing most movies. Concerts and teaching would easily feed a musician. Top actors and musicians wouldn't become millionaires probably, but no one would starve. And everybody would have honest and lawful access to the art.

When I first saw this, I was like "Hey! He's ripping off that TED talk I saw a couple of weeks ago and not even giving credit!" Then I realized that the author of this article DID the TED talk. Doh! Excellent stuff. TED talk and lots of references can be found here: http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20/the-numb ... ight-math/

They just forget one thing: everywhere (except, it seems, the music industry), market determines the value of what you sell.

One can't mortgage a house using an iPod because music is just not that worthy.

I graduated in Music and worked as a musician for some years. I could live comfortably (but would never be able to afford a BMW anyway) with Music. Music sharing was good for me - people would know I exist and come to my concerts.

The Music Industry is useless as a middleman nowadays. Big names don't need it, and the rest of the musical world also doesn't need it.

If no one is willing to pay for what you sell, it's time to re-determine the value. Cinema tickets cover the costs of producing most movies. Concerts and teaching would easily feed a musician. Top actors and musicians wouldn't become millionaires probably, but no one would starve. And everybody would have honest and lawful access to the art.

Maybe I'm dreaming too much...

Top musicians certainly get much better deals from record companies than unknowns, but I'm pretty sure they still make most of the money that actually ends up in their pockets from concerts.

I understand the bind your in and hope all goes well. While I normally don't buy music, I'm more of a NPR programming goof and subscribe to their podcasts, I do try to help support musicans when I go to various concerts by buying some swag. Anyway, I just wanted to state that. Good luck.

Good read on the article and I might have a swing at the book when it comes out. I would have liked to sign up for one of the thirty free copies but I don't subscribe to social networks for personal reasons. Needing to follow and tweet on twitter and 'like' and post on Facebook is a deal breaker for me though. I understand the need for self promotion and all, but in my opinion this rather a bit much.

If the market determines the value of something (as in its only worth what somebody is willing to pay), than the rampant piracy associated with recorded music would place said music at around $0, as people clearly aren't willing to pay squat.

Looking at it from that angle, and using the power of Industry Litigation Math to assume that 0 and ∞ are essentially the same, it begins to make sense that as the value of a work becomes closer to nothing, it simultaneously approaches an infinite value. Suddenly a $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 fine for a phone filled with pirated music makes sense.

Clearly we just need to acclimate, and there is nothing wrong with this system.

While I realize the author is trying to poke fun at absurd penalties, that undermines the the entire premise of the article.

Nobody, not even the music companies, is saying "We've got billions of dollars worth of songs on our iPods."

... until they bring us to court over them.

No, they say that the law allows them damages in that amount.

Quote:

And while I understand penalty ≠ value, it should at least pretend to be proportionate.

Now this is very true. Obviously though, it can't be 1:1, because that wouldn't be a penalty. A lot of people don't seem to get that concept. (Ooooh, you caught me, now I'll pay.) However, there is probably some value between $.99 and $150,000 that would be a sufficient deterrent.

I imagine the real problem is determining damages. Music companies claim wild figures, on the idea of distribution multiplying the damages enormously, but of course they would do that. In the absence of facts, money and legislators go a long way.

Viewed through this lens, the piracy of a single copy of a single song is roughly 300 times worse than driving drunk in New York state (which carries a $500 maximum fine).

I think this sums it up nicely. When the potential* damage done by uploading a song to the internet is valued at more than the potential damage done by driving drunk, the penalties are clearly absurd.

* This is key because the labels have yet to be forced to prove that anyone actually downloaded a song the plaintiff uploaded, thereby negating actual damages in favor of theoretical damages. If we apply this to drunk driving, as the author did, couldn't a drunk driver be held liable for the theoretical deaths of people?

Viewed through this lens, the piracy of a single copy of a single song is roughly 300 times worse than driving drunk in New York state (which carries a $500 maximum fine).

I think this sums it up nicely.

How long would a traffic stop and citation for drunk driving take? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? Let's say 30. Every 30 minutes you spend in New York state that you don't get cited for drunk driving is worth $500. That's $24,000 a day for every day you manage to live there without driving drunk. You could afford a decent Manhattan apartment easily by just staying sober.

Viewed through this lens, the piracy of a single copy of a single song is roughly 300 times worse than driving drunk in New York state (which carries a $500 maximum fine).

I think this sums it up nicely.

How long would a traffic stop and citation for drunk driving take? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? Let's say 30. Every 30 minutes you spend in New York state that you don't get cited for drunk driving is worth $500. That's $24,000 a day for every day you manage to live there without driving drunk. You could afford a decent Manhattan apartment easily by just staying sober.

That's how dumb this entire line of reasoning is.

not at all, drunk driving is something that you do, and pay for if you are caught. 8 Billion $ Ipod is also something that you are are liable for if you get caught.

In other words, just like punishing drunk drivers to make the roads safer the government should be punishing pirates and sort out the recession. Given the amount of sharing and dollars lost to the economy I bet the government could soon start posting a surplus if they just start protecting the content industry like they ought to do in the first place.

Viewed through this lens, the piracy of a single copy of a single song is roughly 300 times worse than driving drunk in New York state (which carries a $500 maximum fine).

I think this sums it up nicely.

How long would a traffic stop and citation for drunk driving take? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? Let's say 30. Every 30 minutes you spend in New York state that you don't get cited for drunk driving is worth $500. That's $24,000 a day for every day you manage to live there without driving drunk. You could afford a decent Manhattan apartment easily by just staying sober.